Patterns: Sell or Give Away

July 5th, 2007

I’ve thought a lot about when a pattern should be free, and when one can charge money for it. Obviously if the pattern is in some sort of print form, it’s reasonable to expect to pay for it to cover the cost of printing at least. I’m talking specifically about online patterns, as there are a ton of them out there. I’m sure you’re familiar with the many free pattern sites out there, such as [Knitty](http://www.knitty.com), [Magknits](http://www.magknits.com), and [Knitting-and.com](http://www.knitting-and.com). If you read blogs, you’ve also seen some bloggers selling their own designed patterns as PDF files. The options are many, and I must admitt that while I have made very good use of the free patterns, I have not yet bought a pattern from the internet. I don’t have a lot of money, and for now I’d rather spend it on yarn.

With all of that said, I would not object to buying a pattern online. I have also considered some day creating patterns that I may sell. It is an interesting decision for a designer to have to make: whether or not to provide their pattern for free, or sell it for profit. While I do think that time and effort should take a part in such a decision, I do not think it should be a major factor. In fact, there are times when a person may have taken days or weeks to design a pattern, but it is not something I think should be provided for a price.

Here’s what I think: Is the item you’ve designed sufficiently original? Has the process of designing required creative decision-making? Would using this pattern as a customer save considerable time in figuring and arranging? If the answer is yes to those questions, then you could consider selling the pattern at a profit. Keep in mind this is my opinion only, and not everyone will wish for such strict requirements before deciding to sell a pattern. I think there is also some value to the online knitting community in providing the pattern for free (there are many examples in the sites linked above), even if it would be a valuable for sale pattern.

As a consumer of online patterns I find very little value in buying something that took very little effort of the designer, involved slapping a stitch-library-stitch-pattern with very little other thought, or taking a basic pattern writing it out and sizing it. I’m not saying these patterns are of little value, but if it feels like something I could figure out on my own with very little effort, why buy it?

So, you know that if I ever decide to sell a pattern, it will have taken me lots of time and creative energy to create. It had better damn well be worth buying! Of course, that’s not for a long way off.

I’ll just end this little rant/essay with a few picture updates. I just can’t help it. I love this sock!

These are pretty damn cool too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.